Figured with the U.S. mid-term elections commencing tomorrow, figured I'd start a thread on all things U.S. elections (if you're interested in Presidential elections, we'll see you in two years). Looks like the Senate is going to be handed back to the Republicans after 8 years of Democrat control. I suppose Obama's use of the veto will skyrocket over the next couple of years. If you've been impressed with how unproductive Congress has been since 2010, just wait until you see how little gets done and passed over the next two! And then there's also the state elections. John Oliver covers this pretty well here:

I have no sympathy for Pompeo whatsoever. He should have known better all things considered.
Not a huge surprise since his perspective on international relations is, in my opinion, pretty piss poor to begin with (see Iran Deal).

I doubt it. It doesn't take much to get whatever chops one use to have to come back. It's muscle memory. I've been told that Axl plays piano at home a lot, so I don't think it's a matter of him losing his proficiency. Likely just a choice with respect to the setlist.

The entire thing was a farce from the get-go. Anyone remotely familiar with NK foreign policy would know how this would end up. Trump isn't the first President to have overtures thrown his way; but he is the first since Clinton to try to make something of them (though, Trump was willing to go way further than Clinton ever did with respect to legitimizing NK leadership).
To be honest, Trump's mistake was thinking this could happen in the first place. His decision to cancel the meeting was the right call in that he couldn't ignore the statement issued by a NK official yesterday threatening the US. Granted, boobs like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Mike Pence did not help the process; with Bolton doing pretty much everything he could to antagonize North Korea. But this was always going to play out the way it has, especially considering who Trump has speaking on behalf of U.S. foreign policy (i.e., Bolton).

The Garden in 1080.
What a weird and wonderful video.
I remember watching this back in '93 thinking that I guess they got to do videos for November Rain and Estranged was busy. But I liked it for its simplicity.
It's great to watch it now and think how much NYC has changed. The grimy and grittiness captured in the video has largely been cleansed, so to speak. There are still some rough spots in Manhattan, but some of the feel depicted in this video is lone gone. Strange time and place and I think it worked well for the song.

Post any and all of your questions relating to the forum here.
For matters relating to the forum's moderating and administration, please use this thread:
http://www.mygnrforum.com/index.php?/topic/212083-moderation-discussion/

Thread to discuss various societal, political and cultural trends that have taken hold across Western societies.
There's a lot of analysis and insight into male alienation that's forging cultural and political movements. One of the leading voices has been Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychology professor.
Came across this article that covers who Peterson is and why he's become championed by the disillusioned young male:
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/3/26/17144166/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life
Some highlights (it's a longish article):
Jordan Peterson is a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, a widely cited scholar of personality, and the author of what’s currently the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book on Amazon in the United States. The New York Times’s David Brooks, echoing George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, calls him “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.”
Jordan Peterson is also a right-wing internet celebrity who has claimed that feminists have “an unconscious wish for brutal male domination,” referred to developing nations as “pits of catastrophe” in a speech to a Dutch far-right group, and, just last Tuesday, threatened the social critic Pankaj Mishra, who’d written a searingly critical essay on Peterson, with physical violence over Twitter. “If you were in my room at the moment, I’d slap you happily” is the direct quote.
The answer is that Jordan Peterson is tailor-made to our political moment. His reactionary politics and talents as a public speaker combine to be a perfect fit for YouTube and the right-wing media, where videos of conservatives “destroying” weak-minded liberals routinely go viral. Peterson’s denunciations of identity politics and political correctness are standard-issue conservative, but his academic credentials make his pronouncements feel much more authoritative than your replacement-level Fox News commentator.
Peterson is also particularly appealing to disaffected young men. He’s become a lifestyle guru for men and boys who feel displaced by a world where white male privilege is under attack; his new best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life, is explicitly pitched as a self-help manual, and he speaks emotionally of the impact his work has had on anxious, lost young men.
Peterson is both a clinical and research psychologist, meaning he sees patients while also doing research. After he received his PhD in psychology from McGill University, one of Canada’s two most prestigious universities, in 1991, he spent two years practicing at McGill’s hospital. After that, he was hired by Harvard, where he taught until 1998. He left when the University of Toronto, Canada’s other leading university, hired him as a full professor and a practicing clinician.
There are now innumerable videos of Peterson arguing with various liberals and leftists on YouTube, with titles like “Leftist Host SNAPS At Jordan Peterson, Instantly Regrets It.” They have millions of views and have led to a massive surge in donations to Peterson’s personal account on the crowdfunding site Patreon. By September of last year, donations on the platform totaled about $62,000 a month.
Peterson’s stellar academic credentials act as a sort of legitimizing device, a way of setting up his authority on politics and making his denunciations of “leftist ideologues” more credible and attractive to his fans. Combine his undeniable talents as a public speaker and debater with his ability to use YouTube to reach audiences around the world and you get a right-wing celebrity who has transcended Canada and become a global reactionary star.
Peterson uses the term postmodernism fairly loosely, but he’s referring to, roughly speaking, French philosophers working in the middle of the 20th century, most prominently Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. “How about if we don’t say ‘working-class capitalists’ we say ‘oppressor/oppressed?’” he says, summarizing the alleged postmodern line of thinking. “We’ll just think about all of the other ways people are oppressed, and all the other ways that people are oppressors, and we’ll play the same damn game under a new guise.” “The Marxists aren’t just wrong: They’re wrong, murderous, and genocidal,” he says. “The postmodernists don’t just get to just come along an adopt Marxism as a matter of sleight of hand because their Marxist theory didn’t work out and they needed a rationalization, because it’s too dangerous — it’s too dangerous to the rest of us.”
Actual experts on postmodernism note that the thinkers Peterson likes to cite were often quite critical of Marxism. His reading of these thinkers, as the social critic Shuja Haider points out, is shallow and deeply uncharitable. “Peterson’s fantasy of neo-Marxist wolves in postmodern sheep’s clothing has little bearing on actual debates in 20th-century political theory,” Haider concludes. “Peterson’s understanding of Marxism and postmodernism is very vulgar,” Harrison Fluss, an editor at the Marxist journal Historical Materialism, tells me. “He connects the two in [an] overarching conspiracy theory.”
Peterson’s framework serves as a justification for dismissing the idea of any kind of privilege — white, male, or otherwise — as a tool used by closet Marxists to manipulate you. He states this explicitly, calling it a “Marxist lie” designed to enable the Marxist-postmodernist effort to seize control of the state.
This theory elevates battles over political correctness and free speech into existential struggles over Western society. He is very literally arguing that if the “postmodernists” win, if people start using others’ chosen pronouns, we’re one step closer to modern gulags. Peterson’s position helps claim the mantle of “facts” and “reason” for the anti-PC right. Because postmodern theorists are skeptical about the notion of an entirely objective reality, Peterson argues, the entire project of “identity politics” is grounded in an irrational rejection of logic and discussion. It’s not only right to reject identity politics; it’s a sign of irrationality not to.
These arguments are catnip for a very specific kind of young white man — Peterson himself said in his Channel 4 interview that 80 percent of his YouTube audience is male. These young men are upset about the erosion of white male privilege, about the need to compete with women and minorities for jobs and spots at top universities, and they are angry about the way feminists and racial justice activists describe society. In Peterson, they found someone telling them that their grievances are not only justified but, in fact, important: that they have picked up on a secret threat to society writ large, and that they are its first victims. Peterson is drawing on a deep well: This kind of anger about the declining social status of white men is incredibly common across the Western world today, and finds a comfortable home in reactionary political movements on both sides of the Atlantic.
“The underlying mass-appeal of [Peterson] is that he gives white men permission to stop pretending that they care about other people’s grievances,” writes Jesse Brown, host of the Canadaland podcast and a longtime Peterson watcher. “He tells his fans that these so-called marginalized people are not really victims at all but are in fact aggressors, enemies, who must be shut down.”
Peterson became more than just an internet celebrity on January 23, 2018. That’s when his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was published by Random House Canada — and skyrocketed to the top of international best-seller lists. It was after this book’s publication, and the following press tour, that David Brooks pronounced him the world’s most influential public intellectual.
Peterson has inextricably intertwined his self-help approach with a kind of reactionary politics that validates white, straight, and cisgender men at the expense of everyone else. He gives them a sense of purpose by, in part, tearing other people down — by insisting that the world can and should revolve around them and their problems. This painful contrast is on display later in that very interview, in which he explicitly argues that concern for sexism is to blame for the plight of the West’s young men. “We’re so stupid. We’re alienating young men. We’re telling them that they’re patriarchal oppressors and denizens of rape culture,” he says. “It’s awful. It’s so destructive. It’s so unnecessary. And it’s so sad.” The empathy that he displays for men and boys in his BBC interview and 12 Rules for Life is touching. The problem is that he can’t seem to extend it to anyone else.

We've moved all the posts from this afternoon's Q&A with Guns manager Fernando to this thread.
This thread is not an official Q&A with Fernando, it was created to make it easier to see some of Fernando's responses.
We don't know if and when he'll be back but we certainly appreciate him coming here and answering what he can.
As always, please adhere to the rules of the forum. We do not tolerate personal attacks or abuse; lashing out and telling others where to go will result in immediate suspensions. But we really don't expect anyone to act like that and ruin the party.
This thread shouldn't be used to vent or sound off against the band or anyone in particular. It's meant to hopefully have a few questions answered. There are many other places on this forum and the rest of the web to sound off if that's what you want to do.

Unless Axl has taken over Fernando’s email account, I’m 99.999999 percent certain it’s Fernando.
Looks like he wasn’t able to respond this morning but we’ll keep the thread open should he find some time to come back today.

Sorry, hate to do this, but we're going to lock this thread until we have some idea if and when Fernando can come back and answer more questions. We'll open this back up if we get word that Fernando or someone from the band is willing and able to come back.
Partly my fault, but this thread is turning into a discussion thread rather than a Q&A thread and I'd rather keep things in focus.
Hopefully there will be another opportunity to ask questions.
In the mean time, feel free to start another thread should you wish to discuss Fernando's responses and the questions asked.

There are many instances of when GNR have announced shows close to their actual performance date. I don't think it's unrealistic at all to assume that more shows might have been added since they've only played England once so far and there's only one date for this leg.
It's not jumping to conclusions. There are contracts and very strict agreed upon rules on how these things are rolled out.